Question

Have a quick question about what would be the best way to implement iterators in the following:

Say I have a templated base class ‘List’ and two subclasses “ListImpl1” and “ListImpl2”. The basic requirement of the base class is to be iterable i.e. I can do:

for(List<T>::iterator it = list->begin(); it != list->end(); it++){
   ...
}

I also want to allow iterator addition e.g.:

for(List<T>::iterator it = list->begin()+5; it != list->end(); it++){
   ...
}

So the problem is that the implementation of the iterator for ListImpl1 will be different to that for ListImpl2. I got around this by using a wrapper ListIterator containing a pointer to a ListIteratorImpl with subclasses ListIteratorImpl2 and ListIteratorImpl2, but it’s all getting pretty messy, especially when you need to implement operator+ in the ListIterator.

Any thoughts on a better design to get around these issues?

Answer 1

If you can get away with making List<T>::iterator non-virtual, then delegating the virtualness off add to List makes things simple:

template<typename T>
class List
{
    virtual void add_assign(iterator& left, int right) = 0;

public:
    class iterator
    {
        const List* list;
        const T* item;
    public:
        iterator(const List* list, const T* item) : list(list), item(item) {}

        iterator& operator +=(int right)
        {
            list->add_assign(*this, right);
            return *this;
        }
        static iterator operator +(iterator const& left, int right)
        {
            iterator result = left;
            result += right;
            return result;
        }
    };

    virtual iterator begin() const = 0;
    virtual iterator end() const = 0;
};

Otherwise (if the iterators need to store significantly different data, for example), then you have to do the regular, boring pointer-to-implementation to get your virtualness:

template<typename T>
class List
{
    class ItImpl
    {
        virtual ItImpl* clone() = 0;
        virtual void increment() = 0;
        virtual void add(int right) = 0;
    };
public:
    class iterator
    {
        ItImpl* impl;
    public:
        // Boring memory management stuff.
        iterator() : impl() {}
        iterator(ItImpl* impl) : impl(impl) {}
        iterator(iterator const& right) : impl(right.impl->clone()) {}
        ~iterator() { delete impl; }
        iterator& operator=(iterator const& right)
        {
            delete impl;
            impl = right.impl->clone();
            return *this;
        }

        // forward operators to virtual calls through impl.
        iterator& operator+=(int right)
        {
            impl->add(right);
            return *this;
        }
        iterator& operator++()
        {
            impl->increment();
            return *this;
        }
    };
};

template<typename T>
static List<T>::iterator operator+(List<T>::iterator const& left, int right)
{
    List<T>::iterator result = left;
    result += right;
    return result;
}

template<typename T>
class MagicList : public List<T>
{
    class MagicItImpl : public ItImpl
    {
        const MagicList* list;
        const magic* the_magic;
        // implement ...
    };
public:
    iterator begin() const { return iterator(new MagicItImpl(this, begin_magic)); }
    iterator end() const { return iterator(new MagicItImpl(this, end_magic)); }
};